A CITY IN CRISIS: HOPE AND PRAYER AMID THE ASHES : Many in Foreign Press See Grim Omen in L.A. Riots : Journalism: In the 1960s, disturbances were viewed as an American problem. With increased immigration and economic tensions they realize it could happen overseas.

Not since the Persian Gulf War has a story directly involving the United States captivated so much of the world’s attention. And to some members of the foreign press, Los Angeles’ riot is more ominous than outright war: It is a harbinger of deep troubles close to home, wherever home may be.

Told in blaring front-page headlines and violent videotape, the upheaval in Los Angeles is receiving epic exposure overseas only in part because of what it says about the world’s most powerful nation and a city known to most foreign readers as the home of movie stars and fantasy.

Perhaps a bigger reason, several foreign correspondents say, is the sense that the story may someday be repeated in cities back home; cities trying to cope with increased immigration, ethnic tensions and a widening gap between rich and poor.

It also is chilling news, suggested Italian correspondent Vittorio Zucconi, because it strikes a deep nerve in the human experience.

“It’s one those stories that go straight . . . to the everyday sensitivities of people overseas,” said Zucconi, Washington bureau chief of La Repubblica, Italy’s largest daily newspaper. “People realize we are all racist deep down, and that we have to deal with this problem. Everybody hates the stranger.”

During the U.S. race riots of the 1960s, Zucconi said, such turmoil was viewed as a distinctly American problem. But with immigration increasing in most industrialized nations, “Now, it’s something that touches everybody. People are reading these stories as something that could very well happen in Milano, in Roma, in Paris. . . . We’ve had beatings in Florence--in noble . . . rich Florence, we’ve already had beatings of immigrants from Africa.”

That would have been “unthinkable 20 years ago,” he said, simply because the city had virtually no immigrants then.

Similar forebodings are expressed to varying degrees by observers from other parts of the world.

“There is absolutely a possibility of something like this happening in Rio or Sao Paulo,” said Ana Maria Behiana, the Los Angeles correspondent for O Global, the largest paper in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. “. . . And one of the reasons is the deep economic abyss dividing the nation’s people.”

Even in Japan, which in recent years has allowed more foreign workers into its homogenous society, warnings were voiced that Los Angeles’ riots should not be regarded as “a fire on the other side of the river.” Commenting in the Asahi Shimbun newspaper, Hayato Yamanaka, a scholar in American history, warned that “this kind of problem could occur in Japan too,” because of relations with foreign workers.

Such dire predictions typically are cast years into the future. But even now, the impact of the verdicts in Rodney G. King beating case rippled in tangible ways beyond U.S. borders.

In Canada, Toronto authorities and leaders of the city’s black community are making extra efforts to appeal for calm in the aftermath of a recent police shooting of a black suspect in an anti-drug operation.

Meanwhile, in such disparate locales as New Delhi and Berlin, protesters against U.S. policy invoked King’s name.

And in South Korea, police have been deployed around U.S. military installations in response to tensions arising from the targeting of Korean and Korean-American merchants in the Los Angeles riots.

With so many Koreans having relatives in Southern California, the riots are “a life-and-death issue,” said Yoon Cho, city editor of the Korea Times in Los Angeles. His reporters’ stories appear here and in the parent publication in Seoul.

In Korea, the story was judged to be so important that 30 journalists were flown to Los Angeles to join in the coverage, according to Michael Min, a correspondent for the Chosun Daily.

Even before the riots, the King story received international coverage because of the shocking nature of the videotape of his beating 14 months ago.

To America’s critics, correspondents say, the videotape seemed proof of brutal, official oppression of minorities. In South Africa, meanwhile, supporters of apartheid cited the King beating in response to American criticism of that country’s racial policies.

Like many Americans, several correspondents said they and their audiences at home were shocked by the Simi Valley jury’s not-guilty verdicts for four Los Angeles police officers charged in the King beating.

Hiroshi Sugimoto, a correspondent for Asahi Shimbun, a paper with an 8.8-million circulation, said the verdicts and the accompanying riots have further shaken the image his readers have of the United States.

“I’m sure they are wondering what American democracy is,” Sugimoto said. “To their mind, America is the country for democracy--this is the ideal. . . . What is happening here?”

Sugimoto groped with the puzzle of Los Angeles and America as he spoke, thinking about the stories yet to write. “I’m still wondering, what is the right focus? The verdict, I still do not understand. But the verdict aside, I do not understand the jury system. . . .”

Many Japanese are concerned about the impact of the riots on their nation’s U.S. business interests, said Sugimoto and Masui Shigeo, his counterpart at Yomiuri Shimbun, which has a circulation of 9.9 million. And some wonder what impact the violence may have on the U.S. presidential elections.

“It’s a tough question,” Shigeo said. “. . . This might favor the Republicans because most of the white people are being threatened. . . .”

Zucconi said his readers have relatively little interest in U.S. politics. Now that the Cold War is over, the President of the United States is not perceived so much as “the man who has his finger on the button,” the Italian correspondent said.

“Nobody cares about politics anymore . . . so the emphasis has moved much more to the society of the United States,” he said. “We still see America as being 10 years ahead of us in terms of trends--including the bad ones, mind you.”

Zucconi recalled how, 20 years ago, European critics used to make intellectual sport of America’s troubles. “They’d say, ‘Oh, the Americans are so racist.’ . . . Now they realize that as soon as we have the same factors in our cities, we are slowly but surely developing the same results.”

Helmut Voss, the veteran correspondent for Springer Corp., a German publishing house with several newspapers and magazines, covered the race riots in 1960s. Both then and now, Voss said, “I find it incomprehensible why a country as rich as the U.S. can allow a whole generation of young people in the inner city to slide into despair in such a degree that they go out in the streets and burn and loot their own neighborhoods.”

One thing seems certain, correspondents agree: The scenes of Los Angeles in flames, of people being dragged from cars and beaten, of rampant looting with no police in sight, of convoys of U.S. troops armed with M-16s occupying sections of America’s second-largest city, will forever change the cliche image of Los Angeles as La-La Land--the capital of glamour and sunshine, the world’s leading exporter of fantasy.

That one-dimensional image was already changing because of international coverage accorded the city’s gang warfare, as well as the videotape of the King beating.

“From being the entertainment capital of the world, Los Angeles now maybe is the capital of racial hatred,” said Aud Berggren Morisse, a correspondent for Verdens Gang, Norway’s largest newspaper.

Like many correspondents based here, Morisse is more accustomed to writing about movie stars than urban turmoil. “In the middle of all this, I had a deadline for an interview with (actors) Michael Douglas and Sharon Stone,” she said. “Those are the two sides of reality.”

Before Zucconi arrived in town, Hollywood correspondent Sylvia Bizio served as La Repubblica’s riot reporter. “I was pleased they didn’t jump on the phone and ask me to call Jane Fonda. Usually that’s all they want,” Bizio said.

Carolin Dendler, Springer’s representative in Hollywood, penned a first-person piece about Angst amid the riot. At her Marina del Rey apartment complex, she said, people who stayed home from work “were lying by the pool, not knowing what to do, feeling guilty about it all.”

When concerned family and friends called, Dendler said, she told them the riots were “not about black and white any more. It’s about rich and poor. . . . There are a lot of black people living where I live, and they still smile at me.”

Behiana, Brazil’s O Global correspondent, let out a pained laugh recalling how her editor needed help getting a geographic fix on South Los Angeles.

The editor, she said, found “this stupid map” that had run with a trendy travel piece Behiana had written five years before, with Malibu and Beverly Hills highlighted as “areas where the stars live.”

Now, she said, the two images of Los Angeles are colliding.

“One image is that every one is very rich, drives a Rolls-Royce, lounges by the pool and goes out to film openings and galas. . . . The other is that it’s this strange place inhabited by gangs and police, where everyone has guns and they shoot it out.

“But where the two Los Angeles come together, they are lost.”

Times foreign bureaus and wire services contributed to this report.

From the Foreign Press

The rioting in Los Angeles is being covered extensively by media throughout the world. Here is a sampling of the reports in the foreign press: ISRAEL

* Yedioth Ahronoth, Israel’s largest newspaper, devoted its first nine pages to stories from Los Angeles. It compared the rioting to the intifada , the 4-year-old revolt of Palestinians in Israeli-occupied lands. “It is hard to resist the temptation to see the comparison between the intifada here and the black revolt there,” the paper said. Both involve “people in despair who feel they have nothing to lose.”

CHINA

* “The massive racial conflict in Los Angeles, U.S.A., is something unfortunate. But it is not accidental,” the official Xinhua News Agency quoted an unidentified Foreign Ministry spokesman as saying. The spokesman said the turmoil “reveals that human rights violations such as serious racial discrimination and abuse of force by police do exist in the U.S.A.”

RUSSIA

* A newscast on the central television company Ostankino on Saturday included extensive footage of the street violence, as well as the deployment of military troops. “Observers come to the conclusion that this does not result from the division of the population only in Los Angeles, but from the division between blacks and whites throughout America,” the newscast reported. “This division can be overcome only through the elimination of its fundamental causes. This is what American voters expect of the country’s future leadership in this year of presidential elections.”

POLAND

* Half of the front page of the weekend edition of the newspaper Rzeczpospolita was devoted to the Los Angeles riots. “The black inhabitants of Los Angeles and other big cities point out that when they are stopped by the police, they are always treated more brutally than whites because it is the colored people who are poorer, commit more crimes and are worse educated than the whites,” one of the stories said. “The whites, on the other hand, complain of reverse discrimination and privileges which are abused by them in order to live at society’s expense.”

BELGIUM

* The riots have dominated the Belgian press and television news since they started. The weekend edition of Le Soir, a French-language daily, ran the headline: “America Under the Shock of Race Riots.” The newspaper’s lead article said: “Nearly 80% of blacks would consider that the judicial system is weighted against them. . . . On the other hand, only one-quarter to one-third of the white population accepts the view that justice is not blind, and more particularly not color-blind . . . This great American tragedy, in the words of one of the leaders of the black community, has taken on the appearance of a civil war.”

-- Compiled from Times staff reports